281–290 of 1001 posts
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Show me a single core product IBM have open sourced.
To some degree they have opened the Power9, which is hardware. For hardware it's like leaps and bounds more open than anything else out there that can compete with it. RISC-V is more open, but the hardware isn't necessarily open, and it's not yet really competing at the same scale as Power9 does... yet. There is hope :)
Good news for Canonical/Ubuntu I guess? I wonder how Linux distro popularity will plot out in next few months.
Well, I don't know anybody in the FOSS community which would be worried it systemd became endangered ;)
redhat had a lot of love in the world. any other vendor that shoved systemd down everyones throat would have been villified. redhat was given a pass. (karma, anyone?)
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I share the sentiment. Gawd. Freaking. Dammit. I've been using RHEL-derived systems for like almost 20 years. This actually feels like a betrayal of the Open Source community. Any bets on whether Fedora and CentOS will exist in November 2019?
Where’s the history of IBM buying and sun setting companies? I don’t have the same prejudice towards IBM that I do for Oracle. But I’m not in a position to know. I’m thinking RHEL’s support contracts will keep IBM from shuttering RHEL. An IBM branded RHEL would represent plenty of income.
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public companies are beholden to their shareholders. Enough shareholders liked the premium they were being offered... It's not good, but it's the peril of most public quoted companies.
Public companies can have multiple classes of stock with different voting rights. Private company can be sold.
Private companies (especially one's who aren't beholden to VCs or similar) have the option to say no, regardless of how much money they're offered.
The history of the “free economy” is one of concentration of market power. Good reference is Galbraith’s “1929 the great crash”
Some of the same conflicts of interest exist in both modern cases, notwithstanding, both have opposite contribution histories.
Am I missing something?
Can the shareholders block this somehow?
Moreover, such companies are often desperate to minimise overheads on operations. Once upon a time they'd employ dozens of specialists, now they're relying on computer models as much as possible to reduce costs and don't much care about what's actually driving the price changes that the model is looking at.
Boards at big companies actually now know this. Suppose you're the board of a big corp and you'd like $10M each even though you didn't do a good job? Just write up paperwork saying you propose that you get paid $10M extra each because of diddly-dee, put it up for a vote by shareholders with a recommendation that they vote "Yes". A few smaller shareholders are paying attention, they'll vote "No". The big institutions are entirely on auto-pilot, and will follow your "Yes" recommendation, your vote passes, you now get $10M with no effort. Giving the board a pile of money for no reason might bankrupt the company. Not your problem, the shareholders voted for it.
For the pension company making your shareholders $10 and then asking for $1 to cover overheads from actual specialists (10%) is seen as worse than making your shareholders $8 and then asking for 10¢ to cover overheads from a few pencil pushers (1.25%) even though in the first scenario the shareholder kept $9 and in the second they only got $7.90. Nobody wants to pay 10%. The result was foreseeable but it's hard to say if it could have been prevented.
The Red Hat board will recommend shareholders accept the offer. Big institutions will (and in this case in my opinion quite rightly) automatically agree and so it doesn't matter what a handful of small private shareholders do.